Issues on the Composability of Requirements Specifications for a Product Family

To develop Requirements Management for Product Families that will satisfy all stakeholders and will promote reuse, we have had to carry out a careful analysis of the various issues related to the composability of the elements of the specifications. Furthermore, we firmly believe that it is essential to design these specifications so that they are amenable to the implementation of a tracking system that links them to all the other artefacts of the product development process (PDP), if platform-based product development and enterprise wide requirements management is to be fully supported. In this paper we present the results of this analysis. These are subject to the specification mechanisms currently used by groups both in Philips Consumer Electronics (PCE) and Philips Semiconductors (PS). Our main conclusion is a clear indication that a full solution is difficult to achieve. We also outline a tentative one whose application is subject to the approval of the project’s stakeholders.